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Comerica finally making memories for fans

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By The Associated Press | Friday, October 20, 2006 1:29 AM CDT | () comments

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Until this year, Comerica Park didn't have much of a place in Detroit baseball fans' hearts. It took a winning team to endear the stadium to a community.

DETROIT (AP) — Until this year, Comerica Park didn’t have much of a place in Detroit baseball fans’ hearts.

It took a winning team to endear the stadium to a community that bore the imprint of beloved Tiger Stadium in its memory for most of a century.

“I found out that it’s a beautiful park — when it’s full,” owner Mike Ilitch said late last month. “What a difference.”

Before this year’s reversal of fortune, culminating in their first World Series appearance since 1984, the Tigers had generated few meaningful memories at Comerica after making their regular-season debut there on April 11, 2000, with a 5-2 victory over Seattle.

“They’re just beginning to reattach,” closer Todd Jones said. “There wasn’t any reason to follow the Tigers because they were so bad.”

That first season, 2.53 million fans — the second-most in franchise history — turned out to explore the new ballpark with its carousel, Ferris wheel, center-field fountain, scoreboard that soars nearly 10 stories and sculptures of Ty Cobb, Willie Horton and other Tigers greats.

Comerica was Ilitch’s $300 million bauble.

“I was a little rabid at first,” Ilitch recalled. “I had a roller coaster planned to go around the whole thing — I got a little carried away.”

The park’s seating capacity was 22 percent smaller than Tiger Stadium’s, but it had 102 luxury boxes compared with Tiger Stadium’s four. Like other owners, Ilitch argued he needed the luxury-suite revenue to help field a competitive team.

The Tigers, however, only got worse. They finished 79-83 in 2000, then went 66-96 in 2001 and 55-106 in 2002 before bottoming out in 2003 at 43-119 and breaking the American League record for losses in a season.

As the team floundered, Comerica’s bells and whistles rang hollow. Attendance plummeted to 1.37 million in the disastrous 2003 season.

It wasn’t just bad teams that kept fans from connecting with the new place; they missed Tiger Stadium.

The storied stadium at Michigan and Trumbull was a hitter’s park where sluggers like Hank Greenberg, Al Kaline, Rocky Colavito, Norm Cash, Horton and Cecil Fielder routinely slapped home runs over left- and right-field walls just 340 and 325 feet from home plate.

The new venue, dubbed “Comerica National Park” by right fielder Bobby Higginson, was bigger in every direction except center field — 420 feet, compared with 440 at Tiger Stadium. As conceived by former club president John McHale, Comerica was to attach more importance to pitching, speed and line-drive hitting.

As a workplace, Comerica and its weight room and other amenities is a vast improvement over Tiger Stadium, Jones said. But, he noted: “There was nothing brought over from the old stadium architecturally. Some of the fans (at Tiger Stadium) were closer to home plate than the shortstop.

“In a brand new ballpark, you have to put in the soul.”